Recently, I’ve curated a number of image series by photographers from ‘Flickr’ on my blog ‘Aesthetic Investigations’. Subsequently, I thought it would be interesting to document these works in a book. Therefore, i’ve arranged a collection of ’39’ abstract and minimal photographic series by these ’32’ artists. A selection of pages from the book can be viewed below, a full book preview can be seen: HERE

‘Downtown Memories’ series captures classically un-photogenic neighborhoods of Marrakesh through nicked and dirty car windows panes. Shooting encased in a moving vehicle, Chraibi managed to achieve well-composed, satisfyingly grainy images specked with points of light. He shows the true nature of the constructions of a city by taking us on a journey into a universal city. The shapes and shades of black & white structures seem familiar, but the vision is blurred and distant, through rain and fragmented light.

Friedlander began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. His photographs bring to the surface the juxtapositions of everyday life that comprise our modern world. Beyond the vigorous outward eye he turns to the world around him, Lee is also recognized for his investigation of the self.

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Lee Friedlander is internationally recognized as one of America’s most important contemporary photographers. In the 1960’s his silver print photographs, described as “open-ended alternatives to normal seeing,” provided a shockingly new aesthetic of asymmetrical and fragmented images of the United States. Lacking defined borders and layered with a disjointed profusion of architectural and advertising elements, his photographs were visually equivalent to the broken, improvisational rhythms of jazz. Working within the tradition of Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Frank, Lee was one of the first modern photographers to portray the “social landscape” of America as a complex mixture of order and chaos, warmth and alienation, refinement, and commercialism. [Extract]

Friedlander often included oblique references to himself by including his own reflection or shadow in the photographs. – “I suspect it’s for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally borne and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.”

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Lee Friedlander’s unique vision underscores the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the potential for photographs to contain varying levels of reflection, opacity, and transparency. Like Atget’s photographs, Friedlander’s images of shop windows evoke a certain ambiguity, an oscillation between reflected and actual reality, that invite inspection of the space and the meaning of the image. Similar responses are encouraged by Friedlander’s street photographs, in which shadows of figures (usually Friedlander himself) and other subjects overlap in the photographic image. The projected outline of Friedlander’s body as within the picture frame implies the notion that the photographer can be both behind the camera and in front of it. Interpreted further, Friedlander’s shadow can be taken to represent the imposition of the photographer upon his world and his subject. [Extract : MoCP]

Okun records architectural structures through multiple exposures. Using a large-format Hasselblad camera, she takes a picture, then advances the film only slightly to achieve a layering effect. A single image may comprise six such overlays, which might then become part of a triptych. Okun’s background is in film, so it follows that the spatial information unfolds sequentially; the images are fragmented and superimposed, causing unexpectedly lyrical interpretations of buildings and space to emerge.

Yet for all their abstraction, what is also compelling about these images is their essentially traditional approach to the documentation of architecture. These days, architectural photography tends to consider circumstances beyond the built form:- climate, use, landscape, and human accessibility — to position the building in its social and environmental context. Okun, however, sticks to the structural facts; her images read as formal records and revelations of space, form, color, and light.